55 Crystal Spheres Geared to God's Crankshaft
by chaletian
Summary: Crossover with Stoppard's Arcadia. There are two things Thomasina notices when she wakes, coughing, the night before her seventeenth birthday.


**Fifty-Five Crystal Spheres Geared to God's Crankshaft**

**by Liss Webster**

_A/N: Written for the Awesome Ladies Ficathon on LJ._

There are two things Thomasina notices when she wakes, coughing, the night before her seventeenth birthday. The first: her bedchamber is on fire (heat exchange only works one way; this is very bad). The second: a large blue box has appeared (it's blue). It has a door, which opens, and through the stinging smoke, Thomasina sees a man step out, and wave his arm.

"Well, come on, then!"

Thomasina takes a moment to weigh her options. The man is strangely dressed (with a most peculiar cravat), and has just come out of a blue box that appeared next to her bed, and she feels Mama (whose notions of proper behaviour for Thomasina were strict when Thomasina was thirteen years and six months; stricter when Thomasina was sixteen years, eleven months and three weeks; and unlikely to have diminished in any way now that Thomasina is on the brink of being seventeen) would be extremely vocal in her disapproval of any action that Thomasina might take involving strange men.

On the other hand, of course, she is in danger of burning to death, which has always seemed to Thomasina an exceedingly unpleasant way to die (as much as the saints gave every evidence of enjoying it in Fox's Book of Martyrs, read from most Sundays by the chaplain), and whilst, facetiously, she and Septimus might jest that there would little to choose between burning alive and facing Mama's wrath, practically speaking there is a very great deal to choose between them.

Thomasina Coverly tumbles out of bed and runs to the man in the blue box.

It's a separate world in the box. Big and gold and noisy, and the strange man is running around pulling levers and banging things and jabbing at machinery Thomasina doesn't understand. Also, the inside of the box is very much larger than the outside, which defies every natural law she knows, and she thinks (maybe) she should have read Newton's Opticks more closely in case it shed some light on how such a thing might be achieved. She clings to a pole as the ground beneath her feet trembles.

The noise ends. The ground steadies. The man grins at her.

"Hello!" he says. "I'm the Doctor. And _you_ are Thomasina Coverly. _The_ Thomasina Coverly. Well, actually, technically you're _a_ Thomasina Coverly - lot of Thomasinas in the Coverly family, very strange."

"It's a fam..."

"Still, you're the only one anyone's ever heard of. Except they haven't. Funny story. There we were at the Congress of Maccadatis XII eating those little vegetable things when half the building erupts (which just goes to show you should never build on a lava planet), and I end up doing some very tricky business with the buffet table and the sonic. Crisis over, everyone's happy, and I make a Thomasina Coverly joke which," he says, peering intently at Thomasina, which she finds a little discomfitting, "should have had them rolling in the aisles. No aisles; not the point."

He prowls around her. "They did not find your joke amusing?" ventures Thomasina, craning her neck to keep an eye on him.

"No-one had ever heard your name before," says the man, and he's stopped in front of her, head cocked. "One of the most celebrated scientific minds in the universe, famous on a million million worlds, and suddenly nobody's heard your name? No, that's not right!"

Thomasina looks at him. "How does this place seem bigger on the inside than the outside?" she asks. And, "I think you may have the wrong Thomasina Coverly."

"Different dimensions," says the man - the Doctor - as he grabs her hand and stares at her palm. "And you're definitely the right one. Earth, 1812 AD. It was the fire. The fire wasn't right. It shouldn't have happened. Why did it happen?" He peers at her again, and Thomasina decides she doesn't like being inspected like a specimen. She pulls her hand away and steps back.

"I don't know how it started. Who _are_ you? Where am I?" She looks across at the machine in the middle of the golden room. "And what does that _do_?"

The Doctor grins, and goes to the door, swinging it wide open. "I told you, I'm the Doctor," he says cheerfully. "We're in London, and the TARDIS - that's what this is, by the way - is what got us here. Come on!" He gestures to whatever is outside the door, and Thomasina swallows, and walks out, head high.

"This is not London," Thomasina says definitely. "I have been to London before, and it is quite a different place."

"Not a different place," says the Doctor, pulling her along. "Different _time_. Haven't you been listening?"

"You have been talking nonsense," says Thomasina. The whole thing is nonsense, and as large carriages rush past noisily without a horse in sight and men and women who should be ashamed to appear so unclothed in _bed_, let alone on a public street, she wonders if she is perhaps run mad, but the Doctor's hand firm on hers is too real.

"Nonsense? I can't believe I'm talking to the same woman who begins her scientific career thinking about _rice pudding_!"

"It wasn't the rice pudding," objects Thomasina, "it was the _jam_, and not being able to stir it back- how do you know about that?"

"I _told_ you," says the Doctor. "You're famous. Except you're not any more, because you died in a fire."

"But I'm not dead."

"Semantics. Here we are."

_Here_ is a tall, narrow building with a sign reading faber&faber. The Doctor checks the clockface on his wrist, and frowns. "They're late," he says. "Unpunctuality. Can't stand it."

"Who's talking unpunctuality?" The faber&faber door has opened, and a girl with red hair is leaning out, a man behind her.

"Ponds!" cries the Doctor ecstatically. "Look, this is Thomasina Coverly!" Thomasina, for want of a better response, curtseys. "These are the Ponds," he continues, "Amy and Rory."

"Actually," says the man, "it's Williams. Williamses. We're married." He gestures. "Me and Amy."

The girl - Mrs Williams? Mrs Pond? Thomasina decides to abandon etiquette and refer to her as Amy - waves an impatient hand at him. "So, you're Thomasina Coverly, eh? I read all about you in school."

"I don't suppose I married Lord Byron?" asks Thomasina. It is, of course, a vain hope, and she is no longer particularly interested in Lord Byron, but old habits die hard.

Amy frowns. "Byron? Nope, doesn't ring a bell. Doctor?"

He taps his chin. "Byron. By-ron. Wasn't he an accountant?"

"He is a poet!" replies Thomasina indignantly. "A most excellent poet!"

"Can't stand poetry," says the Doctor, and flaps a hand. "Go on, then, Coverly. Is she there, Ponds?"

"Upstairs with her editor," says Rory, pointing. "They're talking cover art."

"Who are you talking about?" demands Thomasina. "Please, I do not _understand_!"

The girl called Amy takes her hand, and they stand on the stairs. "Name me some famous scientists," she says, and it's an odd request, but one with which Thomasina can comply.

"Newton," she says. "Aristotle, Archimedes, Paracelsus. Galileo. Copernicus. I suppose you might consider Newcomen and Watt if you..."

"You should be on that list," interrupts Amy. "In our time, you're on that list. Oi, Rory! Famous scientists!"

"What?"

"Name me some famous scientists!"

"Oh. Right. Um. Einstein. Newton. The cancer one. Coverly. Hawking." He carries on, but Amy's back with Thomasina.

"You see? You _should_ be famous, OK, except nobody remembers you."

"If nobody remembers me, how is it that you do?"

Amy waves an airy hand. "We're time travellers. We see things differently." Thomasina raises an eyebrow, and Amy shrugs. "Yeah, I have no idea. But something's gone wrong, see? Somewhere, something's changed, and you died in a fire and nobody ever heard of you."

"Oh. And why are we here?"

"Because in 1994, a woman called Hannah Jarvis wrote a book about you called The Genius of the Place. We read it at school. Only now it's not a book about you, it's a book about your garden, and the hermit in it."

"We don't have a hermit."

"Well, you do now!" Amy's smile is wide and a little bit mad, and Thomasina smiles back, even though they _don't_ have a hermit at Croom Hall (although thanks to Mr Noakes, they do at least have a hermitage, and that is perhaps where the confusion arises), and the idea of _1994_ being in the past is terrifying. "So, the plan is we talk to Hannah Jarvis, since she's what passes for an expert, and find out what changed."

At the top of the stairs, Rory beckons them all forward. "Editor's gone to the loo," he hisses. "She's in there."

Hannah Jarvis is a woman of a similar age to Thomasina's Mama, quite scandalously wearing breeches, who looks mildly askance as the Doctor irrupts into the room. "Hello! Hannah Jarvis? I'm the Doctor, these are the Ponds, and this is... Sally Sparrow. Say hello, Sparrow."

Although Thomasina can see the logic in not telling Miss Jarvis her real name, the Doctor has apparently chosen a poor substitute. Miss Jarvis is scowling at her.

"Sparrow? Honestly, is that the best you can come up with? Is Bernard trying to concoct some sort of revenge over the dwarf dahlia? If he can't apply intellectual rigour to his academic pursuits, that's his own look-out; he can't say I didn't warn him, and if the Byron gang decide to..."

"Byron again! Who _is_ this Byron that people keep banging on about? You know what, not important. Tell me about Thomasina Coverly. The dead one, not any of the others. Well, they're all dead now. The one who died in the fire; tell me about _her_."

"I- you- what?"

Thomasina sympathises entirely with Miss Jarvis. The Doctor smiles engagingly, and leans forward in the seat he has appropriated. "Thomasina Coverly. Died in a fire at Croom Hall in 1812."

"On the night before her seventeenth birthday. She's not the focus of my book, you know."

"I know. But you were interested in her anyway, weren't you?"

"Yes, I suppose so. Yes." She takes a sudden, deep breath, and scrubs her face with one hand. "Right. Sorry. Thomasina. Daughter of Lord and Lady Croom. Had an older brother, Augustus, who inherited the earldom in due course. She had a tutor, Septimus Hodge-" Thomasina's breath catches "- who studied natural philosophy at Cambridge. Contemporary of Byron's, which is where Bernard came in."

"Never mind _Byron_!" the Doctor shouts. Miss Jarvis looks offended, then rather pleased.

"Actually, I quite like that attitude. Never mind Byron, indeed. Thomasina was... well, I'm not sure quite what she was. A genius, maybe. It looks like she had an interest in Maths. She was doing stuff she shouldn't have been able to. I don't really understand it, I'm afraid. But then she died, and it was all lost."

The Doctor is shaking his head. "Oh no. It's never all lost, it's not possible. There's always something, a trace, a sliver, _something_. Knowledge can't ever be gone entirely."

"Like Septimus said!" says Thomasina suddenly, a memory suddenly bright and real in her mind, her and Septimus working at either end of the table in the school room. "There is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it."

"Exactly!" shouts the Doctor, jumping up and rounding on her triumphantly. "Exactly! Smart man, Septimus. Silly name. And that's true of all the universe. That nothing can be lost to it, not that it's got a silly name."

"But then it cannot matter," says Thomasina slowly, thinking it through. "Whether I die in a fire and am forgotten or live and become famous, if what I might achieve cannot ever be truly lost, then it will be rediscovered. I mean, we are here, are we not? And this is a truly remarkable future."

Miss Jarvis stares at her. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Hypothetically!" says the Doctor, jumping up. "If she were to _hypothetically_ die in a fire, of course. And it matters because there is a flow to the universe, an order in which things are supposed to happen."

"Which you ignore," puts in Amy.

"Which I ignore," agrees the Doctor, "but only in a good sort of way. Time and me, we have an understanding. Time acts in a certain way, and someone has been playing with your time, Thomasina Coverly."

"_What_?"

The Doctor toys with his cravat. "I said, someone has been playing with your time, Sally Sparrow," he says.

"No, you didn't," says Miss Jarvis. "You called her Thomasina Coverly."

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"Oh, so what if I did!" exclaims the Doctor, arms flying upwards, apparently all patience flown. "Hannah Jarvis, meet Thomasina Coverly. Thomasina Coverly, Hannah Jarvis. I rescued her from the fire that would have killed her because she's supposed to live a long and productive life of unbelievably amazing scientific achievement, and I brought her here, to her future, to ask your help in in finding out why she almost ended up dead and forgotten. Everyone understand that? Good! Now," he says intently, watching them both, "tell me all about about Byron."

Miss Jarvis frowns (yet again). "I thought Byron didn't matter?"

"Actually," says the Doctor, "I'm getting the feeling it's all about Byron. Who is he?"

"He's a poet."

"He's a wonderful poet," expands Thomasina, thinking back to Childe Harold and a flashing glance she and Byron had once shared across the breakfast table. "The best poet of the age. Though," she admits, "a little scandalous."

"A _little_ scandalous!" Miss Jarvis snorts. "Byron _thrived_ on scandal. The more notorious he was, the better."

"But he is so very romantic," says Thomasina, sighing. "Oh, if you could hear him read from his poems!"

"I've never heard of him," says Rory.

"More to the point," says the Doctor, "_I've_ never heard of him."

"What do you mean, _more to the point_? You just zap around from crisis to crisis. It's a miracle you've heard of anyone. Who spent two thousand continuous years roaming England as a plastic centurion with a really big box?"

"He did," mouths Amy, pointing at Rory, and Thomasina grins even though nothing makes any sense anymore, and she feels like she's riding a galloping horse - no control, just dashing along an ever-changing horizon.

"Me, that's who. So," continues Rory, "I heard about lots of poets, and I never heard of this Byron bloke."

"It's impossible," says Miss Jarvis flatly. "_Everyone's_ heard of Byron."

"Pretty obvious, if you ask me," says Amy. "Byron isn't real. Someone's dumped themselves into that point in time, and that's how Thomasina ended up in the fire instead of famous." She crosses her arms and looks a tiny bit smug.

"Yes!" shouts the doctor. "Of course! More notorious the better, my left foot! Or my right foot. Either of my feet." He looks at his feet. "I need to clean my shoes."

"Focus, Doctor," says Amy, and he looks up again.

"Kadax," he says, starting to pace. "They roam the universe in search of food, but they're not the kind of beings who are satisfied with a sandwich and a bag of crisps, oh no! The Kadax live for recognition. The more people who know who they are, the stronger they become. But they can't do it themselves. They don't create anything. They steal it. And one of them has stolen Thomasina's future!"

They look at him.

"OK," says Rory. "That. Is. Mental. I've never heard of anyone doing... that."

"Oh, come across a lot of aliens in your two thousand years as a plastic centurion?" asks the Doctor snappily.

"As a matter of fact," begins Rory, but Thomasina has had enough.

"Be quiet!" she shouts. "Just, be quiet! Doctor, how can we find out if Lord Byron is a... what you said?"

"Oh. Well." He fishes something out of his pocket, and waves it around. "I'll just give him a quick zap. Dead easy."

"Very well," agrees Thomasina graciously. "Let's return to your time machine and prove the hypothesis. That is the scientific method, if I am to be a scientist."

The sun shines gently on rolling countryside, and Thomasina is still marvelling at what she has seen. "The colours of the sky! And-and that machine! Oh, Doctor, did you see that machine! How was it powered? There was no physical labour, no fire, no steam - how is such a thing possible?"

"I liked those cocktails," says Amy, lying back on the grass and shading her eyes from the sun with a scarf from an Elethiel market. "You've got to hand it to those Kadax, they definitely know how to mix a drink."

"Ug," says Rory, looking pale.

"It was..." Thomasina feels like she's glowing, like the whole universe is expanding inside her, like there is knowledge in every nook and cranny of the world and she can just pluck it out like a blossom from a meadow. "It was _miraculous_."

"Well, miraculous is going a bit far," says the Doctor, considering the matter. "Amy's right, they're pretty good on the hospitality front, but there are some places that'll make your head whirl with their possibilities. Anyway, Byron's back where he should be, the timeline's restored, and you're ready to be go and change the world."

He makes a shooing gesture with his hand. Thomasina stays where she is. She has to go home one day, of course. With her chin propped on her knees, the entire vista of Croom Hall is laid before her, and off in the distance she can see the gazebo, where Mr Noakes appears to be running after his hat, while Mama stands on the terrace with the Polish count. She has to go home one day, and she wants to, because it's _home_, because it's where Septimus is (oh, Septimus, who grew hoary and meagre as a cabbage stalk for her, Miss Jarvis said, but failed to save the universe with good English algebra, because she suspects her earlier theories may be flawed).

She has to go home one day. But not today.

"Take me to another world," she says. "Please. I want to see the universe. I want to understand it all."

"The left! The left! _Decrease_ the pressure, Coverly!"

"No!" she shouts back. They're drenched and the spaceship they are currently inhabiting is about to explode, and Amy and Rory have been put into some sort of husk stasis which Thomasina hasn't had time to properly investigate, and the Doctor has now taken to wearing something which is apparently known as a trilby, and is glaring at her quite ferociously, but Thomasina knows she's correct and she turns the wheel to the right, because she can see the calculations in her mind.

"I said the right!" the Doctor shouts unnecessarily over the silence left by the sudden cessation of the self-destruct countdown, and he's grinning and Thomasina's grinning, and she's going to find out how you can put a person into stasis in a husk, and the universe is _wonderful_.

THE END


End file.
